Penguin Practicalities – how to survive and even grow thanks to the Google Penguin

If you don’t know about the Google Penguin update which hit earlier this week by now, you either have been on a social media blackout, don’t have Analytics installed, or are so white-hat you make Rand Fishkin look like a Fiverr Xrunner spammer. Formerly known as the “Overoptimisation penalty”, it’s hit the Internet Marketing world like a truck, and sent many, many SEOs’ traffic into freefall.

Ste at Dukeo has a radically different take on the Penguin – he thinks it has opened up a new land of affiliate opportunity – *”The Clickbank playing field has never really been that level for anyone who got into Clickbank late on – like most people. Most Clickbank niches have been virtually impossible to break into because “Super affiliates” had them locked down so hard. The tables have turned now.”

If you’re looking for a nice, calming overview of the situation from someone with a long view, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land’s your man – “After any update, it’s always possible to come away with a skewed view that the sky is falling in terms of relevancy. The reactions I’ve seen to the Penguin Update? They could have all been drawn directly out of reactions from the Florida Update of 2003. “

It’s easy to get carried away trying too hard to fix problems – Dr Pete at SEOMoz offers detailed advice on countering the Penguin that should stop you going overboard – “It’s unclear how Penguin may have penalized links, or if recent reports of link-related issues are tied to other April changes, but regardless of the cause, the worst thing you can do is to start simply hacking at your back-links. Even low-quality back-links can, in theory, help you, and if you start cutting links that aren’t causing you problems, you could see your rankings drop even farther.”

Of course, SEOMoz are white-hat as hell – if you want a slightly greyer view of post-Penguin SEO, Dukeo’s update echos what seems to be the state of the art now – “Lots of people will tell you that automated tools no longer work. This is absolutely not the case – because they are still very effective when you use them on your second tier.”

And finally – and you probably shouldn’t read this one if you’ve been badly hit – the SEOBitch at Shoemoney has an, erm, uncompromising view on the situation – “While I am sure there probably are a few sites mixed in with the whiners that really didn’t deserve to be de-ranked, the majority make you think ”wow, not only are you swearing your site is the equivalent of Jesus in your niche, you just posted it on the Google forums with a big LOOK AT MY SPAMMY SITE stamp all over it.””

Obviously, the Penguin’s flap is still echoing around the IM world, but it’s good to see solid information starting to come out on how to deal with its effects. We’ll keep linking the best articles as they keep coming!

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